Sublime

For Shimen, the “community” is a set of concentric circles beginning with his (dead) family, extending to Gerer Hasidim, and extending further to others committed to the Jewish way of life; the farther out the circle, the less weight it earns in Shimen’s calculus.

he pauses and asks how this person is and as he talks he quietly places a few coins in some inconspicuous place. But when the meeting ends he always says, “Shmuel, you are a man who bears misfortune with dignity. You must know God better than I do. Give me on this happy Friday your blessing,” and he makes the man feel that it is he who is doing the

“Joe the Jew.”

From earliest rabbinic times there were such institutions as the tamchui, or mobile kitchen, which distributed food daily to whoever applied,

some far-off court in Ethiopia or Yemen, a sloe-eyed rabbi in a gaudy kaftan. That impossible black rabbi with his outlandish Torah, the realm of women:

Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off.

Mordechai Berkowitz, a blacksmith, established a workshop